Life Is Rescues

Looking for trouble with a national team of emergency-response volunteers.

Calamity is commonplace in Iceland, and rescue is sanctified. “People think of the rescue teams as the Guardians of the Galaxy,” a mountain guide said. “They forget these are normal people.” Above: a volunteer from the Hella rescue team during a drill.

Photograph by Benjamin Lowy / Getty Images Reportage for The New Yorker

When Ásta Stefánsdóttir failed to show up for work, her family called the police. This was in Reykjavík, Iceland, last year, on a Tuesday in the nightless month of June. A few days earlier, Ásta, a thirty-five-year-old environmental lawyer, had gone with her partner, Pino Becerra Bolaños, to spend a long weekend at her grandmother’s cabin in the countryside. Bolaños, a sports trainer from the Canary Islands, had missed an outdoor training class she was scheduled to teach that morning.

The police visited the cabin—they weren’t home. An officer found himself ranging downhill, drawn toward a cleft in the hillside, where a torrent came out of the highlands. The area—deceptively gentle farmland in the foothills of the Tindfjalla glacier, not much more than an hour east of the capital—was called Fljótshlíð. After about ten minutes, the policeman came to a deep ravine. He scrambled to a vantage point and looked down into the gorge, where he saw, more than a hundred feet below, a body floating in a pool. It would be impossible for him to reach it from above. As Guðbrandur Örn Arnarson, Iceland’s search-and-rescue project manager, told me recently, “It is a terrifying place.”

Immediately, a call went out to the local search-and-rescue teams, which are part of the country’s sprawling system of emergency-response volunteers, known collectively as Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg, or, in English, the Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue—ICE-SAR. Within hours, a dozen or so people from a number of teams had climbed up into the gorge from downstream, recovered the body, and lifted it out by helicopter. It was Bolaños. An autopsy determined, from her bruises and broken bones, that she’d died from injuries sustained in a fall of thirty or so metres. Above a waterfall of about that height, some hundred and fifty metres upstream, there was a swimming hole. The path down to the hole, descending a sheer cliff, was narrow and slippery. People had died there in the past. At the water’s edge, rescuers found two pairs of shoes.

What had been a relatively straightforward accident scene now became something more complicated: a search for a lost person. “We never just assumed that Ásta was in the ravine,” Arnarson said. They had to consider that she might have wandered off in grief or panic. “And we never assume it’s a crime scenario. We leave that to the police.” The Landsbjörg teams adhere to databased search techniques and internationally recognized theories of lost-person behavior. For example, they categorize by type. A hunter, a hiker, a child, a senior suffering from dementia: each tends to get lost, and to try to get found, in a particular way. The hiker usually follows trails, and so likely goes astray at decision points and then attempts to retrace. A hunter may follow the blood trail of a wounded animal over wild terrain and, in the fervor of the pursuit, lose his bearings and then improvise. What do people do when a lover has fallen or drowned? The possible scenarios were that one woman had fallen and the other had then fallen or drowned while trying to help, or else that the survivor had scrambled free and reached out for help or done something irrational.

The SAR leaders made circles on a map, each ring denoting a probability. The outer ring traced natural boundaries, such as rivers and mountains. The searchers then divided these areas into zones and methodically searched, eliminating one after another. A net was strung across the river at the end of the gorge, and divers and rope teams worked their way up and down the ravine, in extremely difficult terrain. By the weekend, they’d found nothing.

Arnarson, the SAR project manager, convened a committee to do a review. “There was still a very remote possibility that she was alive,” he said recently. “But realistically we knew this was a recovery, and a difficult one.” They focussed again on the pool where they’d found the shoes—the so-called Initial Planning Point, or I.P.P. From the pool, a torrent swept through a rift in the rock and dropped thirty metres. “We suspected that Pino had gone through that. At the bottom, where the waterfall hit, there was another pool, which was completely unsearchable. Divers went in but couldn’t get close enough. Three or four metres from the waterfall, it was a total washing machine. So we’d searched everything well, except the I.P.P. If the I.P.P. is unsearchable, you have a problem. It is really hard to close a case where the I.P.P. hasn’t been searched. In fact, it’s unacceptable to me. So, we said, the waterfall has to go.”

Turn off the water: there was some disagreement over that, although, this being Iceland, it was muted and civil. They figured they needed a few minutes to search the lower pool. The waterfall, they calculated, carried about a thousand litres per second. They concluded that it would be too difficult and damaging to the land to divert this flow into another river, via a trench. “So instead we came up with the crazy idea to siphon off the water in the pool with a pipe,” Arnarson said. “It would be like stealing gasoline from a car.” Searching the Internet, he had come across a farmer in Texas who had irrigated a field this way. They brought in three twelve-metre lengths of PVC pipe, an array of pumps, and, in the absence of electricity, a small armada of generators. “We were concerned about the forces we were dealing with,” he said. After a couple of aborted attempts, they managed to reduce the flow by forty per cent. Swift-water rescue technicians got a quick look. “The men who went in, they said, ‘That funnel—it’s a beast.’ We were not going to send people in there.”

By then, after two weeks, four hundred and seventy-four people from fifty-nine rescue teams, using eighty-one vehicles, had been involved in the search. Most of them were volunteers, taking time away from their families and jobs. The papers followed their efforts closely. The decision to call off a search is always the hardest one to make. “We are good at identifying with the pain of people,” Arnarson said. “In a smaller community, you can’t hide in the masses.” Nonetheless, the next day, in coördination with the police, Landsbjörg abandoned the search.

Arnarson added, “Sometimes we have to evaluate risk versus return. Very rarely do we make decisions unsupported by data. Sometimes we determine that there is no chance that the person is still alive. It can sound callous. In the end, once we know it’s a recovery, we do it for the living, for the families left behind.” Another rescuer told me, “It’s harder to stop a search than to start one.”

A month later, during a routine twice-weekly hike down into the gorge, a member of the SAR team from the nearby town of Hella found Ásta’s body. She was well downstream of the waterfall but above the net. The autopsy determined that she’d died of hypothermia.

Iceland, with a population of little more than three hundred thousand, is the only NATO country with no standing Army. It has police, and a coast guard, but these, like the citizens they are paid to protect, are spread thin, so come accident or disaster, disappearance or storm, the citizens, for the most part, have always had to fend for themselves. Landsbjörg has evolved into a regimented volunteer system that serves as a peerless kind of national-emergency militia. It is not a government program, and so represents a tithing of manpower. There are close to ten thousand members in all, with four thousand of them on “callout” duty, on ninety-seven teams. Pretty much every town has a team. (Reykjavík and its surrounding municipalities, where more than two out of three Icelanders live, have eight.) They are well trained and well equipped, self-funded and self-organizing, and enjoy a near-mythical reputation among their countrymen, who, though often agnostic regarding the existence of elves and gnomes, are generally not inclined toward reverence or exaggeration. “People think of the rescue teams as the Guardians of the Galaxy,” a mountain guide told me. “They forget these are normal people.”

Were Iceland, say, Rhode Island, a system like Landsbjörg would be nice enough—grownup Boy and Girl Scouts to help firemen get cats down from trees—but Iceland, besides being sparsely populated, is marooned far out on the polar edge of the North Atlantic, just below the Arctic Circle. It has harsh, unpredictable weather and a raw, inhospitable landscape. Since it was first settled, more than eleven hundred years ago, by Norse chieftains, its inhabitants have waged a perpetual war with the elements. There are volcanoes, crevasses, avalanches, earthquakes, tidal waves, ocean gales, sandstorms, and glacial-lake outburst floods, to say nothing of winters without daylight and varieties of precipitation and wind uncommon to the temperate zones. It is hard for a visitor to appreciate how quickly conditions can change, and how dismal they can get. One might sometimes hear an Icelander describe a blizzard in terms of snow driving up from the ground. Calamity is almost commonplace, and so rescue, its counterpart, is ingrained and sanctified.

The guide told me, “If you’re a dude who wants to come here and do your bucket list and put your picture up on Facebook, you’ll go home in a black bag. I’ve seen tough guys, real tough guys, crying out there, wet and cold, their tents exploding in the wind.”

There are teams in the towns, and then overarching teams pulling together the best members in their respective disciplines: ocean rescue, mountaineering, glacial travel, avalanche search, parachuting. Nurses, hunters, mechanics. The teams have a fetish for vehicles; each seems to have a shiny souped-up fleet. In many cases, it’s the supercharged trucks with the floodlights and monster tires (“We just call them cars,” a rescuer named Eiríkur F. Sigursteinsson told me), or the Ski-Doos and Zodiacs, that lure young people to volunteer. They undergo eighteen to twenty-four months of basic training and then do further work in whatever discipline is to become theirs. As with any human endeavor, there are hierarchies and assertions of status. “The mountaineers think they’re the center of the universe,” one rescuer said. One of those mountaineers smiled when I told him this and said that when he or his cohort get into trouble they just call each other for help, rather than SAR. “Otherwise, you get a hundred people showing up, with all of their cars and trucks.” Everyone is proud of Landsbjörg’s urban search-and-rescue unit, which assists in natural disasters abroad. At the headquarters of the Kópavogur team, the unit keeps a souped-up shipping container ready for deployment overseas. They say they were the first foreign rescue team to arrive in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake there.

In the absence of government support, the rescue teams get most of their funding from the sale of fireworks. In Iceland, setting off fireworks is legal just one week a year—around New Year’s Eve—and on those dark days Reykjavík turns into a subarctic Tet, a festival of detonation and smoke. Last year, Icelanders blew up five hundred tons of fireworks. Most of the public’s arsenal comes from Landsbjörg, which coördinates their manufacture in China and then imports them throughout the year. Each team manages its own inventory and sells from its own stalls and storefronts. The Kópavogur team has seven fireworks stores and last year bartered a pallet of fireworks for a tractor. Landsbjörg is in some respects just a fireworks mafia, to the same extent that the Girl Scouts is a network for the distribution of Thin Mints. The remainder of Landsbjörg’s funds comes from donations and from the sale, every November, of little painted-plastic key-chain icons called neyðarkall. Neyðar means “emergency,” and kall can mean either “call” or “man”—a convenient pun. Icelanders collect them, for the sake of the cause. Landsbjörg also operates slot machines.

Landsbjörg traces its roots back to the formation, in 1918, of a rescue team in the Westman Islands, an archipelago just off the southern coast. The women on shore banded together and organized a rescue crew to curtail the loss of their men at sea, and in time other fishing communities established similar groups and protocols. Eventually, the fishing industry, as it grew, supported these efforts with donations. On land, farmers, left to their own devices, looked after each other, as they will.

Elvar, a banker, swims through snowmelt in the mountains of Landmannalaugar to rescue a family of tourists.

Photograph by Benjamin Lowy / Getty Images Reportage for The New Yorker

The galvanizing event, countrywide, was the so-called Geysir crash, in September, 1950. During a nighttime snowstorm, the Geysir, a Loftleiðir DC-4 Skymaster, en route to Reykjavík from Luxembourg with a crew of six Icelanders (but no passengers, except for eighteen dogs in wicker cages and an American woman’s corpse in a coffin), lost its bearings and disappeared. For three days, there was no sign of it. The local papers printed the crew members’ obituaries. On the fourth day, a coast-guard vessel off the northeastern coast picked up a distress call: “Location unknown—all alive.” The plane, it turned out, had crashed into the Vatnajökull, the biggest glacier in Iceland, and the crew, after enduring a blizzard, had found a transmitter in a life raft that was pinned beneath the fuselage. Reykjavík rejoiced. The American military, which had an air base nearby, sent a rescue ski-plane, but after it located the Geysir and landed on the glacier it got snowed in and couldn’t take off, so now its crew, too, was stranded.

There was little choice but to fetch them on foot. A group of vacationers from Reykjavík, who were touring the highlands in four-wheel-drive jeeps, hooked up with members of a local alpine club, and together these two dozen civilians staged an epic rescue attempt. Amid warnings over the radio that they not loot the wreckage, they four-wheeled to the base of a mountain, climbed over the top of it and down onto the skirt of the glacier, and, with primitive gear and almost nothing in the way of supplies, skied almost twenty miles across the ice to the crash site. (Vatnajökull is more than twice the size of Rhode Island.) Then they hauled out all ten survivors, during an overnight retreat in darkness and subzero fog. Of the dozen dogs that had lived through the crash and its aftermath, the rescuers shot all but one, to spare the dogs from freezing or starving to death. Another crew returned a couple of weeks later to get the coffin, the cargo, and the only dog they’d spared, an Alsatian named Carlo, who had run back to the plane when the first rescuers had tried to take him with them.

The idea of rescue seems as essential to the national mythology, in its way, as sagas and trolls. The Reykjavík journalist Óttar Sveinsson has written twenty-two books about Icelandic rescues, one per year since 1994, with “Útkall”—in English, “callout”—as the first word in the title of each. All the Útkall books have been best-sellers in Iceland. The one about the Geysir—“Útkall: Geysir er Horfinn,” published in 2002—has sold better than any of them. (Sveinsson has had it translated into English—“Ingigerður stretched her arms out as far as she could. In the gale Magnús found her chilled hands, and held on”—but has yet to find a publisher.) Landsbjörg has figured in many of his books and was the centerpiece of his 2013 one, about a fleet of giant-tire jeeps that got stranded on a glacier. A woman and her nine-year-old son got out of one of the jeeps and fell into a crevasse, hand in hand. Where the ice narrowed, some hundred feet down, the mother died on impact, but the boy was alive, clinging to her arm to keep from slipping deeper. The rescuers had to be lowered head first to get to him.

“The rescue squads are very close to the heart of the nation,” Sveinsson said. “We have come to believe it is a normal thing, to have this in our lives. In some ways, we are spoiled inhabitants.”

Iceland’s version of dialling 911 is calling 112, and people abuse the 112 system much as Americans abuse 911, even though the 112 responders are civilians, with families and day jobs. Rescuers will tell you tales of Reykjavíkers lazily calling on them for silly mishaps—one team leader remembered being summoned by a resident to pick up a garbage can that had blown over in the wind. “And he wasn’t eighty,” she said.

“Rescue teams have become the answer for everything,” a guide named Védís Ólafsdóttir said. “Are Icelanders too comfortable with it?”

But if anyone is spoiled it’s the tourists. A system designed for communal self-preservation has become an underfunded and underappreciated national concierge service for visitors from abroad. The number of tourists in Iceland has tripled in the past fifteen years. There will be more than a million visitors this year, many of them drawn by Iceland’s reputation (which the country markets abroad, too) as a place for easy access to adventure and raw beauty. They tend to overrate the easy and underrate the raw. They get themselves into all kinds of trouble.

“The system of the police, the state, and the tourist industry doesn’t have the capacity,” Kristján Maack, the leader of the team from Kópavogur, told me. “We are a nation of three hundred thousand trying to have the things that nations of millions of people have.”

Some have proposed that those who are rescued should pay a fee, or that visitors from abroad should pay a rescue tax. “People are fed up with tourists getting stuck in rental cars,” Hörður Míó Ólafsson, an adventure guide, said. “There’s talk of stopping catering to the hippies who come here with their tents.” There has been a surge in reports of tourist stupidity and disrespect, such as the one this summer of a woman and her children defecating on the street in broad daylight in a town along the southern coast. Icelanders like to cite the instance of a tourist who’d gone missing from her tour group. SAR teams mobilized, and the tour group joined the search. After several hours, someone realized that the missing woman had, in fact, merely changed her clothes, and when she got back on the tour bus no one had realized who she was. She, too, had got caught up in the search. Now this story is known as the Woman Who Searched for Herself.

Last winter was Iceland’s stormiest in decades. Spring came late and stayed cool. Tourists arriving in mid-June, the beginning of the high season, found many parts of the highlands still closed, the roads impassable, owing to the snowpack. The hut at Landmannalaugar, a popular trekking base in the southern highlands—Iceland’s Yellowstone, sort of—didn’t open until the end of the month. Every summer, as part of a Landsbjörg initiative called Safe Travel, rescue teams encamp there for a week at a time to patrol the area and be on hand for the inevitable mishaps. The first shift started in July and belonged to the team from Garðabær, a town adjoining Reykjavík. I got to tag along.

I arrived in Iceland to the talk that, the previous night, seismographs had recorded a hundred earthquakes just offshore, and to the sight, at baggage claim, of a few members of the band Mudhoney as well as the hip-hop eminence Flavor Flav. They were due to perform at a festival on the old NATO base in Keflavík. Iceland has more music festivals than it does rescue helicopters. In spite of (or maybe because of) its remoteness, it has become known as an outpost of the techno-artistic avant-garde: Ólafur Elíasson, Julian Assange, the Bedroom Community, Björk. This Iceland doesn’t overlap much with the Landsbjörger’s island of top-roping seminars and monster trucks. The news among the rescuers I met my first day was of two ill-equipped Czech climbers who’d got stuck on a cliff the previous night while descending Mt. Esja, near the capital. To spend time in the company of a rescue crew is to see the country as a grid of horrible accidents and comical false alarms. Life is rescues.

The Garðabær crew mustered the following afternoon at their headquarters, a garage and warehouse space next to a primary school on the outskirts of Reykjavík. The team has around sixty active members. Ten were heading out on the highlands watch. The team leader was Guðrun Katrin Johannsdóttir, a thirty-nine-year-old product manager at a company that sells animal feed, who joined up six years ago because, among other reasons, she’d bought a rescue dog and wanted to put him to work. She had on her red Landsbjörg jacket, with an icon (an old neyðarkall) on her zipper of a searcher with a dog. While another veteran of the team, a phone-company technician named Palli Viggósson, went through boxes of food, Katrin did the familiar show-and-tell that I came to think of as the Presentation of the Vehicles. Garðabær had four snowmobiles, a Sno-Cat, two modified red Toyota four-door trucks with forty-four-inch spiked tires, and two vans. They were packing provisions into one of the trucks and a van, which had a trailer attached.

“Palli and I are in charge of the cars,” Katrin said. “I think I might be the only woman in Iceland in charge of the cars.”

There were ten people on this watch. Besides Katrin and Palli, they were Magga, Maggý, Elvar, Elva, Einar, Einar, Rebekka, and Halli. Rebekka and Magga are sisters. Elva and one of the Einars are a couple, as are Magga and Elvar. (In Iceland, people generally go by their first names. Surnames are typically just patronymics: the father’s first name with “son” or “dóttir” attached.) It wasn’t easy to keep them all straight, but it beat trying to figure out where we were going. Icelanders’ pronunciation of place-names is confounding even when you have the words spelled out on paper.

The youngest was twenty-three: Halli, a gentle bear of a man with a big Brooklyn beard, who’d joined up because of the cars. He didn’t talk much. I think the first thing I heard him say, in English anyway, was “Cold is a state of mind.” Elvar, forty-two, a banker, arrived in a suit. One of the Einars inspected bins of probes, shovels, ice axes, helmets, and avalanche transceivers. The members of the team provide their own gear. Rebekka sorted through the food supply—all of it donated, mostly by Icelandic companies. Employers support Landsbjörg mainly by allowing their employees to go out on rescues or training missions without docking their pay, but they also sometimes kick in for food. It’s like jury duty with a free carton of eggs.

Rebekka called shotgun. The convoy hit the highway, passing big-box stores and meadows of purple lupine. Within minutes, it pulled into a gas station, where members of another Landsbjörg team were loitering on the grass, and warning approaching motorists against the country’s dangers. The Garðabær crew got out and mingled. Elva went inside for gum, and when it was time to go, Einar, unable to find her, drove the van in circles around the station lot. The week’s first search: they found her after a few laps.

A while later, as the road cut through foothills of steaming fumaroles, the team came upon a three-car fender bender. They all got out, but no drivers or passengers were hurt, and the police were supposedly on their way. Onward. The next stop, not much farther east, was a KFC in the town of Selfoss, home to the team handballer Þórir Ólafsson and the grave of Bobby Fischer. Afterward, having forgotten to get gas, they had to backtrack a few miles, to a station that provides Landsbjörg vehicles with discount fuel. Now they got caught in traffic heading back through Selfoss. One began to get a sense that this wasn’t SEAL Team 6.

Elvar handed around a bag of strange salty licorice candies called Dracula Mega, and gestured to the broad river that passes through Selfoss. Last spring, a car had driven into it. A search for the driver ensued: divers, Zodiacs, police. They found him the next day, well downstream, sitting on a front loader, dazed and hypothermic. Someone suggested he might have driven the car into the water on purpose. Insurance scam? Suicide? “The rescue teams speculate a lot, but that doesn’t go into the media,” Katrin said. “We search a lot for people we know were going out to kill themselves.” Iceland does not have a notably high suicide rate. It ranks thirty-fifth among nations, between Belgium and Angola. “You have to get into the mind-set of the person you are looking for, and this can be tough. We are the only team with a contract with psychiatrists.”

It took about four hours to reach Landmannalaugar. The road skirted west and north of Hekla, a volcano that last erupted in 2000 and that a thousand years ago was known in Europe as the Gateway to Hell. “It’s due,” Katrin said. The last hour was unpaved and rough, through a moonscape of lava and pumicite, leading toward the mountains. Landmannalaugar sits at a bend in the river coming out of the highlands, in a broad gravel basin braided in spring by snowmelt. It’s hemmed in by peaks composed of a volcanic rock called rhyolite, which takes on an array of colors: orange, gray, green, and black. This spectral display was, uncharacteristically for July, more than half obscured by snow, which made up for the affront by reflecting the reds and pinks of the Arctic high summer’s seemingly endless twilight. Between sunset and sunrise, the alpenglow spans midnight and lasts for hours.

Just above Landmannalaugar, a lava flow tumbles down toward the camp, a tangle of volcanic rock that some of the rescuers call Mordor, after Tolkien’s blackened wasteland. In the fall of 2013, the Garðabær team spent weeks searching Mordor for a missing American hiker who’d gone out alone on a trek. He wasn’t found until the following spring.

On patrol in Landmannalaugar.

Photograph by Benjamin Lowy / Getty Images Reportage for The New Yorker

To reach Landmannalaugar, you either park and cross the river on a crude footbridge or, if you have the right car, you ford it. When we got to the bank, the water was a couple of feet deep and running hard. I’d heard it said, Wade across first, and if you drown don’t attempt to drive it. Two buses had got stuck the previous week and had to be towed clear, but the Toyota and the van, with their giant tires, plowed through to the far bank, wheels spitting. Landmannalaugar consisted of two huts—one for hikers, the other for the rangers—and a basic structure with bathrooms, showers, and barbecue grills. Bright-colored campers’ tents—say, a hundred—dotted the basin, like so many tulips. At the far edge of the settlement was a pair of old army-green school buses, which had been converted into a makeshift store called the Mountain Mall. Next to them was the Landsbjörg hut, a wooden box of two hundred and fifty square feet, with four bunks, a kitchenette, a card table, and scant remaining floor space. Ten was a tight fit. The crew spent the next several hours unloading supplies, setting up the kitchen tent, and getting the cabin ready. It never got dark.

This was one end of the most popular trek in Iceland, a four-day hut-to-hut walk called the Laugavegur. It passes through rough country routinely beset by foul weather. Even experienced hikers frequently get into deep trouble. “Actually, it’s amazing, judging from the number of them, that we don’t have to rescue more,” Katrin said. Everyone had stories. One of her favorites was a story I came to know as the Saga of Hot Pants. A few years ago, three college-age kids from Holland showed up at Landmannalaugar to make the thirty-three-mile trek to Þórsmörk. The two men were wearing jeans. The woman was wearing hot pants. It was a few degrees above freezing and starting to snow. The SAR volunteers and the hut warden tried to talk them out of setting forth, or at least “to put on real pants,” Katrin said. (Instead, the woman put on pantyhose under the hot pants.) Hours into the hike, the Dutch group stopped at a pass with a memorial to an Israeli tourist who had died here of hypothermia in 2004. The snow was coming down hard. One of the guys had a ukulele. “The Dutch hikers just gave up there,” Katrin said. “They just lay down. They thought they were dying. They were just two hundred metres away from a spot where they would have seen the hut, but they had a full-on breakdown. Being stuck is a state of mind.” A warden brought them to the hut, and the team fetched them several hours later. “The next day, they got on the bus. They tried to ditch without paying for the hut. If you do that in Iceland, people will know. It is a small country. No one will help you anywhere.”

In the morning, Rebekka summoned everyone to the kitchen tent: “Beikon! Beikon!” The rescue team huddled around a propane wok, chattering and laughing in Icelandic. Palli was the worst snorer, they all agreed. On a pair of folding picnic tables they’d set out cans of Heinz beans and juice boxes, and they drank coffee out of clear plastic cups, on which each team member wrote his name with an indelible marker. The team passed around a box of kleinur—Icelandic doughnuts—and spread butter on slices of white bread. There were scrambled eggs and beikon, donated by Nýherji, the I.T. company Elva worked for. Day One of highland watch is the high life.

All of them spoke excellent English. Though they’d studied it a bit in school, they said they had learned it mainly from television. Over eggs, they called out the names of shows: “Little House on the Prairie.” “Friends.” “Dallas.” “Beverly Hills, 90210.” Palli, the eldest at forty-five, recalled that there used to be just one channel, and no TV on Thursdays, and none at all in July and August.

At eleven, the crew headed out on patrol. Their territory covers hundreds of square miles, but most of it was still largely inaccessible owing to snow on the roads. Halli and Katrin took the truck. Halli roared along a dirt track, hammering potholes and bumps and skidding through turns. The road took them into Dómadalur—Judgment Valley—a vast stretch of volcanic sand, with a brush of vegetation catching the light. This was a landscape of car commercials and movies about earthlings on semi-habitable planets. Lakes, craters, river crossings. “There’s nothing on earth more beautiful than this area,” Katrin said. Off-roading was strictly forbidden. “Because of the vegetation and the soil,” she said. In places, the volcanic sand had a faint fuzz of green. She clucked whenever she saw a tire track even a few feet off the road. A task of the highland watch is to report violators to the police. In one spot, near a lake, the road was blocked by a drift of rotten snow. The Toyota, on giant tires and in low gear, toddled through, but other drivers had gone off road and left a mess of tracks in the mud. To Katrin, this was like coming across an elephant shot by poachers: “This is awful. Awful.”

Volunteers from the Hella mountain rescue team.

Photograph by Benjamin Lowy / Getty Images Reportage for The New Yorker

Five hours passed. They crisscrossed the countryside. Occasionally, Katrin and Halli encountered the others, who were in the van doing the same thing, and teamed up to check out some notable spot: a cave, a crater. To everyone’s disappointment, there were no stranded motorists or emergency calls of any kind—not even a flat tire. It was, of course, indecent to hope for misfortune, but the SAR crew was eager to see some action—to test their skills, their training, and their tools, and to scratch the altruistic itch. Almost everyone who signs on for Landsbjörg seems to carry whatever gene it is that compels people to want to help others, but I saw no trace of the hero syndrome, the one that leads people to create emergencies in order to resolve them.

Three years ago, a September snowstorm in the northeast buried thousands of grazing sheep. Rescue teams spread out in snowmobiles, scouring the horizon for humps in the snow. They deployed avalanche probes (long stakes, like tent poles). As the snow melted, flocks of heads poked out of the drifts. “If you found a ewe, you’d probe for the lambs,” Katrin said. These were the spring lambs, which were ready for slaughter. It was a little strange to put out so extraordinary an effort to save animals that would soon be killed, but the farmers faced an economic catastrophe. From a cost-benefit perspective, the operation was hard to evaluate, but that’s math that Landsbjörg doesn’t care to do. “We do the work,” Katrin said. “It costs a lot, but we still do it.”

Generally, it seems, the rescuers enjoy what they do. “The most fun are the callouts in the storms,” Katrin said. “There’s snow and you’re shovelling like crazy. You get a lot of action for the cars. But most of the time it’s nothing. Someone is missing for six hours and then suddenly he turns up, or you spend two hours climbing a mountain to reach someone stranded there and then a helicopter picks him up, under your nose.”

Landsbjörg is in some ways the most mundane thing about Iceland and yet also a kind of secular religion. Kristján Maack, the head of the Kópavogur team, a photographer who also guides tourists into a caldera, told me, “The winters are long and dark, and there isn’t much to do. We have declining church participation, so people do this instead. Sing together, play cards.”

The goad, for Maack’s generation, was a series of devastating avalanches in the Westfjords in 1995. Massive snow slides buried the villages of Súðavík and Flateyri. Six hundred rescuers worked the debris. In the end, they recovered thirty-six corpses and twenty survivors, among them an eleven-year-old girl who had been buried for eleven hours. Many SAR volunteers didn’t return to the job after that. It was too much. But many young citizens, following the tragedy on TV, admired the effort and years later found themselves bumping around the hinterlands in red Toyotas, looking for someone to save.

The twilight that night lingered well past midnight, the sky afire with the reflected light of the sun just below the horizon. The air was still and near freezing. A hard rain came at 5 a.m., followed by a cold, blustery fog that seemed to cut through Gore-Tex and wool. The camp stirred late. The dismal weather brought hope to the team:

“Now the fog—we’re getting excited.”

“And a bus just brought in fifty-six schoolkids from the U.K., so maybe something happens.”

Einar got to work screwing an antenna to the roof of the hut. He was perched on the top rung of a ladder while the others stood around giving directions. How many Landsbjörgers does it take to screw in a light bulb? “Eight,” Palli said. “One to screw in the light bulb and seven to stand around hoping he falls so they have something to do.” Einar, on tiptoe, reached up blindly. Palli said, “The ladder is wobbly, so there is always hope.”

Four bunks for ten rescuers in the Landsbjörg hut.

Photograph by Benjamin Lowy / Getty Images Reportage for The New Yorker

The afternoon brought more driving, this time up to the so-called fishing lakes, an hour north: Halli and Palli barrelling through a rolling desert of black sand, which, when covered in snow, is an off-roader’s paradise. In the evening, the team loaded up again and tore off. They came upon a car with a flat, another with a family nervous about fording a river. The team decided to help both parties across. Halli and Palli, in the red Toyota, led the way through the current. The car with the spare, a Nissan sedan with a Swiss family aboard, followed. Halfway across, it got stuck. You could see, through the window, that the wife and the daughter were yelling at the husband, and the husband was wearing his incompetence in the way husbands often do: trying to pass off mortification as cool. He’d failed to put the car into four-wheel-drive. Halli and Palli guided him out, as the rest of the team stood on the bank and took photographs. The other car turned around and headed back down the road, out of the highlands.

“You’re no virgin anymore,” Palli said to Halli: his first rescue call.

On the third evening of highlands watch, Magga, Elva, Katrin, Rebekka, and Einar sat in their cabin, playing a card game called skitakall, which they said meant “shitty man.” The rules, to say nothing of the banter, were indecipherable. I wandered out into the rain and then into the kitchen tent. On a row of plastic hangers someone had hung the team’s bananas. Each hanger held two bunches. I stood looking at this, in admiration and wonder. Iceland.

Suddenly, there was commotion outside the tent. “We have a mission!” a voice called out. The team members were rushing around, gathering their things and giving high fives. “A car is stuck in the river!” I thought of the old TV show “Emergency!” and the way Squad 51’s banal fire-station goings on were always interrupted by alarms and bursts of activity.

Katrin took the red truck, with Elva riding shotgun. The rest followed in the van. The drive was just a couple of hundred yards. The truck plowed into the river. There in the middle of it was a rented black Kia Sorento wagon, tilted upstream, listing a little into the current. A GoPro was mounted on the hood. And on the roof was a woman in an Adidas sweatsuit, curled up in such a way as to keep every part of her body as far from the water as possible. The truck pulled alongside. She was yelling, “My documents! My documents! Just help us! Please.”

Katrin tried to get her to calm down. There were four people in all: husband at the wheel, wife in the front passenger seat, young man in back. The woman on top of the car was apparently the young man’s wife—the daughter-in-law. Her husband was trying to coax her into the car, but she was clinging to a handbag and shouting. The river, swift and gray in the gloaming, lapped at the wheel wells. The headlights, at water level, cast an eerie light. A small crowd had gathered on each shore. “Turn off the car!” Katrin told the man at the wheel. The engine was dragging water in. He was half smiling—mortification masquerading as intention, or else suppressed mirth at the mess he’d got into and the panic it had set off.

The family was Lebanese. They had been planning an Iceland trip for five years. The woman on the roof had handled the logistics. This was their second night in Iceland. They were staying in a hotel in Hella, near the coast, but had unaccountably driven into the highlands at night to have a look. They’d had no intention even of staying in the campground, so there’d been no reason to try to ford the river. But they’d followed a bus through, and when the bus slowed so had the Kia, and then it was stuck. In a panic, the mother had tried opening her door, which was on the upstream side. The river poured in and sucked the upstream side down. The daughter-in-law had scrambled atop the car, fearing for her documents.

Now she was starting to grab for the truck. Being stuck is a state of mind. The woman reluctantly passed her handbag to Katrin, and then suddenly was coming through the Toyota’s rear window. On the shore, Einar and Elvar were donning their dry suits, life vests, and helmets.

Katrin backed the truck up. Einar and Elvar, in the river now, tried to attach a line to the rear of the car to pull it out. Elvar, fully submerged alongside the rear bumper, couldn’t find a hook. He rigged the line around the rear wheel instead. They were improvising, whistling and calling out to each other and making hand signals that nobody could read. The Lebanese driver was turning the wheel the wrong way, the usual dad mistake.

The kitchen tent.

Photograph by Benjamin Lowy / Getty Images Reportage for The New Yorker

Katrin’s first two attempts to drag out the Kia failed. The angle was wrong. She turned the Toyota around, and they let out a winch, which was attached to the front of the truck. Elvar had found a hook. They hitched up the Kia and reeled it in, like a salmon. Water came pouring out, followed by the three soaked Lebanese.

The crew ministered to them, giving them blankets and food, transferring their luggage to the van. The Kia wouldn’t start, so the team pushed it off to the side and called in a tow truck. The electrical system was toast, but they refrained from mentioning this fact, or that the engine might be ruined, too, and that this would probably cost the family upward of ten thousand dollars. The family had been through enough. The team made them some space in the hut. It was nearly midnight by the time the gang got back to their card game. ♦